San Francisco Ballet

a two-and-a-half-hour symphony." His strategy was to focus on "finding the right music to capture what is going on emotionally at any given moment, and having a musical follow-through that would tie the whole thing together. It's a full-blown symphonic score." While Liebermann wished for a detailed libretto, designer John Macfarlane would have preferred to have the music at hand to guide him in his work. "Music helps with the design process because it gives you all your pivot points, a kind of thread for how to go through the piece," he says. "Music is what makes me see in my head — images, set changes, and what would be exciting to go with the relevant moments of music." However, because his creative process coincided with Liebermann's, he had to create the sets and costumes without music to guide him. Fortunately, the story has "a lot of meat on the bones," Macfarlane says. "I kicked off by doing the anatomy theater. For the designer, it's the core of the piece — it's a fantastically theatrical space, a very magical and frightening space. It has all the connotations of dissection in an era when people were digging up bodies out of graveyards so they could learn anatomy." Next came the skull-emblazoned front cloths, "and then I moved out in different directions from there," he says. For the Frankenstein family's home, Scarlett "wanted a house where there's been terrific sadness," Macfarlane says. "So no matter how lovely it seemed, you came out of the house and there was a coldness and the feeling that, in this very bleak and empty landscape, something was out there." For the first interior scene he chose a washed-out palette. "That whole scene should feel like a bleached photograph of this one moment in a family's life, when it was all lovely," he says. The reds we see later in the ballet are faded pinks here, and Macfarlane ended up bleaching the blue dress he had designed for Elizabeth, which looked too solid and heavy once he saw it onstage, to "a very pale, kind of frosted blue, and quite cloudy." Macfarlane calls the 18th century "a very kind period for dancers," explaining that the women's corseted bodices are "pared away round the neck and shoulders," thus allowing for freedom of movement. The skirts are voluminous, but he used lightweight fabrics suitable to dancing, creating the period shape by adding net at the hips and in back. "And you've got the most fantastic coats for men," he says. Macfarlane bears in mind the effect Scarlett's demanding choreography can have on the costumes. "Liam is capable of shredding a costume in one rehearsal," he says. In designing costumes, what's most important to Macfarlane is to give each dancer an onstage identity. "I hate costumes that don't mean anything," he says. "You go to a lot of classical ballet and you think, 'I don't know who these people are meant to be, and from where.' It's one of the great pleasures of doing ballet costumes — that you get people to look believably like real people, but they can dance." Macfarlane is a very hands-on artist, constructing models himself and doing much of the painting. For a backdrop, he lets the scenic artists rough in the design. "Then I get going on it, normally with one other painter, and basically turn it into one of my paintings," he says. For the front cloths, he painted the skulls, which were photographed, then animated and embellished via projections. For the Creature's body stocking, he spent an hour on each dancer's costume, drawing all of the scars and sutures, tendons and sinews. Choreographically, Frankenstein is laced with characterization and filled with movement that is distinctly Scarlett's — what Ricardo Cervera, a ballet master at The Royal Ballet, calls "Liamisms." For example, in one lift a dancer wraps herself around her partner in a suspended leap; elsewhere, when gesturing with a leg, a dancer turns in, knee and foot toward the midline, before turning out. "In order to make something bigger, or more open, you close it first," says Cervera, who taught much of Frankenstein to the SF Ballet dancers. And there's Scarlett's use of the upper back, especially with the women: "always very, very open," Cervera says, "very luscious and expansive." In some story ballets, the main characters have movement motifs — steps that are specific to them. In Frankenstein the motifs come in the form of movement quality that tells us who they are. "Henry is upbeat," Cervera says. "Victor is a little bit heavier," his movements slowed by longing and guilt. In his Act 2 pas de deux with Elizabeth, the young woman taken in by the Frankenstein family when she was orphaned as a child, Victor struggles with conflicting feelings. "His love for her is as strong as his guilt for what he's done, so every time he looks at her or feels that love, the guilt comes as well," Cervera says. "And she doesn't understand what's going on. She goes from being quite childish and girly to almost trying to take that mother role, hold him, support him, because he's so fragile." In the Creature's movement, he says, there's an element of the grotesque. "Some of his stitches haven't healed yet; he hasn't been put together quite right. Therefore it can't be just beautiful movement the whole way through. [His solo] breaks into moments that remind you that he's not really human." The idea of struggle permeates the ballet. Characters chafe against themselves, one another, and social constraints. "There's the social etiquette that you have to adhere to, and there are all the inner battles, all the relationships," Cervera says. The movement reflects this 03 FRANKENSTEIN CONTINUED 62 SAN FRANCISCO BALLET 2017 SEASON GUIDE

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